A reminder that Open Source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
51–60 of 229 posts
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, there is. Basically, thats the default in most of the world. My recomendation if that is what you want to do, is to put a note in the readme and in LICENSE.txt that says "this project is copyright by me. If you want to use i, reach out to me and if I like you, I will give you a license". Then if you like someone, give them a written statement that you like them, and grant them permission to use your project(s),…
I sort of like this. I wonder if it is enforceable. "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" software license.
> I wonder if it is enforceable.
I can't imagine that it wouldn't be. If a company has explicit written permission from the copyright owner granting permission to use that copyright, then they can use it.
Also, it wouldn't be a special license. If you wanted to do a "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" thing, you'd just set it as all rights reserved and add special note encouraging people to ask for permission to use it.
Plus, copyright enforcement typically goes in the other direction. It's not about who you can sue, it's about who you can't. Licenses are just a way of specifying who you cannot sue. If you want everybody to use your project but don't want to bother with a license, you can make it all rights reserved (the legal default) and just not sue anybody. You could sue them if you wanted to (which is why nobody would ever use your code: because of the risk that you change your mind and sue them), but nobody is forcing you to.
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#53Let's say you accomplish your goal of dissuading "big corporations" and "bad guys" from using little auth middleware library, and you get a bunch of other open-source maintainers to do the same.
The "big corporations" will shrug and throw a few more tens of thousands into their R&D budget and will assign a few devs to create an alternative, and when they release it as open-source, they'll use it an opportunity to self-promote, it'll have a slick website, and "X by Big Corp" will become the go-to library.
The "bad guys" will just shrug and steal your code. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion but I don't think you're going to get him on copyright infringement.
If you can somehow convince the majority of non-corporate developers to not use corporate-sponsored open-source, then that might be interesting, but not by much, because there aren't many of those.
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil” Point the author makes is precisely that they don't want to do free software, and they'd like to convince you not to do free software
There are already so many ways (and reasons) not to do free or open source software. People who find them convincing are using them. People who don't generally are not. It seems like the author of the post is just potentially having a change of mind from one side to the other, which barely even seems noteworthy.
Basically every argument has been made before, but there's still 10,000 people a day who are just finding out about it for the first time (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
Clearly this sparked enough discussion and upvotes to make it to the front page of Hacker News, so people found it valuable.
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#55I understand the intention of what the author is trying to achieve, but I think the problem they will run into is how do you define "evil" in a legal document or license? There is a subset of acts and beliefs that wider society has deemed "evil", but I doubt large corporations are actively supporting sexual assault, torture, murder etc. What the author is referring to is things they find morally reprehensible but do not reach the level of the aforementioned acts enough to be expressly illegal and evil (and whether they are or not, IANAL).
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#56Two thoughts.
Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed an idea on an episode of The Exponent (https://exponent.fm/) the idea of a "principle stack", and at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues. I wish I could find the episode again, it was quite a few years ago. The upshot being... maybe software licensing isn't the right place to address e.g. income inequality?
On the other hand, I definitely encourage tech workers (and all workers) to think about their place in the world and whether their work aligns with their personal values. I think the existence of free and open source software is a fantastic thing, but I think we should continue to evaluate whether it is in danger, or whether it could be better, or whether our efforts might be applied to something else.
For example, I'd love to see co-ops developing shared-source infrastructure based on principles of mutuality, which the sector is built upon anyway. The co-op principles already include cooperative and communitarian ideas which mesh really well with some aspects of open-source software development. But co-ops aren't about just giving everything away either. There could be a real new approach to building a software commons for mutual businesses, rather than a kind of freedom-washed way for big tech companies to benefit from free labour.
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#57It seems like CC-BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) works perfectly for this: Anyone is allowed to use it, but they have to credit you, and they can't use it for commercial purposes.
You're still free to license it out commercially on other terms, the open-source community gets to make use of it as they please, and it ensures you're credited.
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#58I understand the intention of what the author is trying to achieve, but I think the problem they will run into is how do you define "evil" in a legal document or license? There is a subset of acts and beliefs that wider society has deemed "evil", but I doubt large corporations are actively supporting sexual assault, torture, murder etc. What the author is referring to is things they find morally reprehensible but do…
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 - a person gave permission for IBM to "use JSLint for evil".
Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#59Free software is about freedom. Restricting it from anyone means it's not free. There is no requirement that we must create free software but if it's called free I think it should always have the basic qualities of freedom; not only when it fits our purposes and our values.
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Re: Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
#60If you prevent licensing software to large corporations, small corporations won't use it, either, because small corporations may get acquired by large ones. Such a license would be a "poison pill". I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. We picked the Boost license for the D Language Foundation because it is the closest to public domain we could find. Besides, why would "bad guys" be deterred by a license, an…
Such a poison pill could be considered a feature insofar as it discourages consolidation of companies.
There are very few, if any, projects big enough to be a consideration to NOT acquire an entire company.